Pictured above: A Blue Banded Bee gets ready to sleep for the night by clasping onto a suitable stalk with its jaws

Blue Banded Bees are amongst our most beautiful Australian native bees. They are about 11 mm long and have bands of metallic blue fur across their black abdomens.

Blue Banded Bees are solitary bees. This means that each female bee mates and then builds a solitary nest by herself. She builds her nest in a shallow burrow in clay soil or sometimes in mudbricks. Many Blue Banded Bees may build their nest burrows in the same spot, close to one another, like neighbouring houses in a village.

Blue Banded Bees can perform a special type of pollination called 'buzz pollination'. Some flowers hide their pollen inside tiny capsules. A Blue Banded Bee can grasp a flower of this type and shiver her flight muscles, causing the pollen to shoot out of the capsule. She can then collect the pollen for her nest and carry it from flower to flower, pollinating the flowers. Quite a few of our native Australian flowers require buzz pollination eg Hibbertia, Senna.

Tomato flowers are also pollinated better when visited by a buzz pollinating bee. Researchers at the University of Adelaide made substantial progress in developing native Blue Banded Bees for greenhouse tomato pollination.

It would be much better for our environment to use our native Blue Banded Bees for this purpose rather than introducing European Bumblebees to Australia! (European Bumble Bees are not found on mainland Australia. Instead, native Blue Banded Bees and Carpenter Bees fill the niche of buzz pollinators on the mainland.)

Source: https://www.aussiebee.com.au/blue-banded-bee-information.html